


this is what love sees.

by theatrythms



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Ishvalan War, Mothers and Daughters, Original Character(s), Politics, References to the Ishvalan War, Survivor Guilt, family fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2020-11-24 18:18:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20912018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theatrythms/pseuds/theatrythms
Summary: “When did children,” Roy starts. “Get so hard to manage?”Always, Riza thinks. And it’s not that children themselves are hard to manage, it’s all the love you have for them and sometimes, with all the blood on her hands, she feels unholy to love them, unworthy to care for them.





	this is what love sees.

**Author's Note:**

> happy belated fma day !!! ive had this written for like over a year but i decided to finish it ! i hope you enjoy ! obviously didnt invent roy and riza having a daughter called christina , but ik its fairly popular in fic ! anyway . roy and riza are my parents .   
title is from fireman's lift by eiléan chuilleanáin !

Here is what happens next.

They have a family.

Or an attempt at one. Two war damaged war veterans decide reproduction is the best way to go and it doesn’t go as poorly as they imagine. They decide they want to watch with wonderstruck eyes while their infant raises your head. They want to hold their baby while they cry, rubbing the small of their backs to the span of their shoulders and think they could feel their little wings.

They have children they don’t deserve and they are parents their children deserve better from.

  
  
  


Samson is born in the heat of the Ishvalan desert, in a medical hut with an Ishvalan midwife who helps her through it with a smile cut off by a scar, and burns on her hands.

She’s the first person to hold him. Her skin is still red and raw when she cups his head, and he makes no screams or wails but a small yawn, as if coming into the world was a Herculean effort. The damaged scar tissue around her mouth stretched thinly when his small chest heaves, and his small mouth opens.

“A boy,” She croaks in Ishvalan, holding Riza’s hand like a lifeline. “You have a son.”

(A first born boy in Ishval is always a blessing.)

But they name him Samson and love him. He takes his first steps in the Ishvalan sand, totters around the tent-city and trials after the royal blue soldiers and watches the red sun die on top of his father’s shoulders.

He’s infectious to the life around him. His skin darkens and freckles but his nose burns. He picks up Ishvalan from those returning home, those who fled and wary to return. An Amestrian boy with thick black hair and black eyes sitting with the restless. Dipping in and out of the medic tent, around the corners of tarp, strung canvas and polls dug into the earth, weaving around the natural world they were creating.

(Samson Mustang is seperate from the Flame Alchemist, and the people know that.)

Samson came from Ishval, a tale of a man who once tore down the Great Temple, only to build it back again. He was blind, Roy said with a small smile, when their hours-old boy still had eyes the same colour of the transparent clouds. So they called him Samson, since he was born into the rebuilding of Ishval and stayed long enough to see the Great Temple brought back to its former glory.

She’s been around men all her life and her boy just comes to her, like she’s known him all along, with his dark eyes and hair and wide mouth. He has Roy’s most prominent features, but she knows he’ll have Berthold Hawkeye’s nose and mind and will break her heart in all the ways he did.

  
  
  


Christina is different.

She’s born in the depths of winter in the Fortress of Briggs, in a holding cell disguised as a medical centre. Her entire pregnancy with with Christina is during a country-wide tour, starting in the South and rolling up the coast. Samson is three, and holds onto her for the whole of it.

She’s in the early signs of labour when Olivier comes to see her. She doesn’t say anything, when Riza feels like her back is about to snap in half, and ignores whatever whimpers that slip out of her.

(She doesn’t tell Roy, doesn’t pull him away from the Briggs Bears he needs to impress to get him the candidacy. She has hours to go.)

“I’m sure you’ve been through worse than this, right Captain?”

“I’m not a Captain anymore.”  _ What am I, now?  _ Gets brushed under the deliria of labour.

(Campaign bait, Riza thinks, but it’s written in Olivier’s eyes. Even Bradley knew that having a wife made him more human.)

Olivier sits with her, takes Riza’s hand in hers, and helps her bare the pain.

A girl, the doctor said, and it hurt to hear.

A little girl that she already loves an uncomfortable but comfortable amount.

The name Christina comes by accident. Partly after Roy’s aunt, who’s first name is Carlotta, three years older than her brother and his pretty Xingese wife, heard of the baby and crooned “ _ Doesn’t Christina Mustang have such a charming ring to it, dears? _ ” 

(So Christina stayed but came and went; so did Chrissy and Christa and Tina and Chris and every other variant that would fit into the next identity, or phase she had curled around her eyes, like a mask she forgot how to take off. Christina grew up as the daughter of Amestris, the closest to a Princess they had.)

Since Samson and Roy she’s gotten used to the idea of unconditional love. Love without boundaries, without thinking, and she practices it every day, when Samson reaches for her hand, or Roy’s shoulders are so hunched she has to physically has to bend them back herself.

But raising little girls is different than raising boys. Riza has spent so little of her life as a little girl and forced to grow up too young (the military doesn’t accept soldiers that are scared of the dark) and she can’t remember the sweet way her mother used to talk to her.

She doesn’t know how to give her the love a girl deserves in this world.

And that’s what scares her the most.

  
  
  


And when her eyes come in they come in honey brown.

  
  
  


Consciousness sinks in for her, and now she has a daughter.

“Hey girl.” Riza croons, when it’s just her and her daughter. “My darling girl.”

Riza, ultimately, has no clue how to raise and love a girl when she spent so much of her life wishing she was the son her father wanted.

So she decides to push any lingering doubt away. She wanted a girl. She prayed for a girl. She’ll tell everyone and anyone that Christina was made in her dreams and now she’s come true. Now she’s here, and now she’s real.   
  
  
  


The campaign trail starts when she doesn’t even notice it.

General Mustang is now a bright star among the military. A family man now, with a wife and children and a vision now. He wants to see the world better and brighter and bigger.

Christina becomes the darling of the rallies. At four her hair is long and with curls no one knows where she gets them from. And her big honey eyes that go so well with royal blue dresses with white stockings and black shiny shoes.

Samson normally clings to her, tall for six but sharp and smart.

Sometimes Riza hates to see her family become a media circus. Men with cameras asking Christina to ‘smile big for the folks at home’ and yelling at Roy to look over, to smile more, what does he plan to do for the rural west, what does he plan to do with Ishval, why doesn’t he use alchemy anymore, will he ever take on an apprentice.

It’s exhausting. One reporter, one of the only women she’s seen with a notepad and a pen tucked behind her ear, but all she asks is how Riza copes with life outside of the military, life as a mother, life as a wife. Does she bake. Do the children misbehave. What will she do once she becomes First Lady.

(Riza has always been in the background, been behind him, where it mattered and where she shone the best.)

Samson clings to her and Christina doesn’t listen when she tries to keep her away from the cameras and the eyeing faces and the questions. Do you like your daddy? Is your daddy a nice person? Will he be good for Amestris? What is your favourite colour and how will he fix the economic crisis?

As if Roy knew the answer to that.

  
  
  


“I didn’t think it’d be like this. I thought I could just run and they’d vote.”

“Maybe when Bradley was in power. But we changed that.”

“Yeah, we changed that.”

  
  
  


Change is hard. They learned that in Ishval. The children don’t adjust to having another sibling but they make faces at Hugh and coax small grins out of him, even when he’s not looking at him.

They step into the wide halls of the Führer’s home, the roaring green dragon of Amestris perched along the walls outside and around the manor.

There is no Führer anymore. Roy wins the democratic position of President, but it still gives him control over the military. Roy wins, on promises he intends to keep, on promises he’ll do his best to make, on promises to be more transparent across the state.

Hugo is born the same year Elicia turned eighteen, and her hair had gone darker and her eyes softer, and the same year Riza turns forty one. Of all three births, one in the heat of the desert, another in the depths of Fort Briggs in the height of winter, and the last in Central City Maternity Hospital; it was the last that was the hardest.

“They had to cut him out.” Marcoh says, afterward, his eyes kind.

She’d seen alchemic healing scars before; just around her neck sits a white ring from when Mei Chang knitted her skin back together, joined cell to cell and kept her blood flowing. Her scar is less polished, curving at the end of her stomach. Rushed, in the way alchemy always is and alkahestry isn’t.

They agreed, when naming the children, there’d be no ghosts. No one to linger over the cradle, no one to haunt. No Leopold or Lian; no Elizabeth or Berthold.

Their children would have their own names.

And then Riza woke after the surgery, and Roy had named him Hugo. Close enough to be a legacy, close enough to be his own self. He was named before she could say anything different.

When she’s ready to sit up, and then ready to stand, and then ready to walk, her small team gets her ready for the press, the lines of photographers waiting outside of the Maternity hospital, gifting her a yellow dress and low heels, minimal makeup, a flattering coat to hide her body.

Riza has never been so public before, holding Hugo closer to her, letting the cameras wash over her, and she hates how vulnerable she is here, like this.

  
  
  


“You’re happy, aren’t you?” Roy asks, his eyes never leaving Hugo’s small face and hands. Christina and Samson are curled up on either side of him, their dark heads tucked against his arms.

He’s asked her everyday and every night since she retired, since they married, since Sameson and Christina were born, and now with Hugo. He asks again, with eyes that were once unseeing.

(Which is probably why he tries to memorize their faces, to look and stare and see everything he can, even if it’s ugly, even if it’s awful, even if he wants to look away. Roy Mustang has been on borrowed time before.)

“Yes.” She says without question, like she does every day and night. “Are you?” Riza counters, and it draws out the smallest smile from him, until he’s beaming.

“I am.” He nods, and his eyes are shining. “And it’s all because of you.”

She’s about to answer, when Hugo lets out a dry wail, his entire face scrunched into one howl. Riza stifles a laugh, sees that all that has happened here is that Hugo is alive, and now he himself knows it too. Small hands reaching and clutching at the soft linen sheets, and the spots of light breaking through to his eyes.

  
  


Riza Hawkeye was a soldier in the Ishvalan War.

Riza Mustang is all part of the face of the nation. Riza Mustang hosts dinners and galas and luncheons and is the patron of charities. Riza Mustang is photographed holding babies and kissing babies and talking about her children, photographed taking her children to public projects, talking warmly of his policy implementation, never, ever, making it seem like this is a life she cant stand.

Emily Bradley was the First Lady of Amestris years before Riza had ever imagined her taking the position.

“You do it better than I did.” Emily says, watching with the fondest smile, as Selim holds Hugo up by his hands, helping him walk. It’s a public library opening, covered in balloons, full of children, the cameras snapping distantly in the background as the First Ladies talk. “And King didn’t make it easy. Not in the slightest.”

(Selim is Samson’s friend, a few years older, but there are worse children in the world for her son to look up to and aspire to be, to trail after like a shadow. But Selim was once Pride, and Riza will never be able to forget his lingering stare from her days as Bradley’s assistant, or the whispers in the dark.)

(Riza has no way of confirming this, but Emily Bradley knew what her husband was and loved him anyway.)

  
  


When Samson was smaller he’d trailed after them everywhere, follow their shape around their apartment, then the house, then the mansion, but by then he was older, eight and prim and proper, with a face like hers.

“A sullen boy.” Some general’s wife had remarked, even if the purple cravat he’d been wrestled into matched Christina’s velvet dress.

“Christina will be such an it-girl someday.” To contrast, a major’s wife gushes, as the twenties were coming to a close, as if Amestris everywhere wasn’t on fire, as if the economy hadn’t plummeted that sent a ricochet around the world.

(But not Ishval. Roy swore to never leave them in the dark, and he didn’t recall the loans. He did, however, siphon money from the military, to keep the welfare service afloat.)

“His excellency is the youngest leader we’ve had in a long time.” One nods, and Riza nods back, as if she doesn’t hear it constantly. He was always compared to her grandfather’s sixty two and Bradley’s fifty six. Roy Mustang took the position at forty four, with three young children, one born in office, and they had somehow become the greatest accessories to his reign.

“And the youngest, Hugh, isn’t it?” Another says, her smile thinly stretched. There’s the lowest level of resentment for them in the older circles of the military, career politicians who saw their chances dashed, who’d crawled through wars for the sake of dying with honor, despite the blood on their hands.

Riza’s smile is strained too. “Hugo, actually. He’s a bit too young for functions like this.”

(They love to talk about how raising three children is one of the great adversities the young president faced. The first time Riza saw his role in the Ishvalan War in the same sentence as the names of her children she vomited and cried and then got back up again.)

“Bright futures, of course.” Someone says, and it’s all Riza can ask for.

  
  


The Mustang children do have bright futures.

Samson is a sullen boy, with his head in books and in the clouds and he doesn’t grow into his height. He takes on shadowing Alphonse Elric, since his own father won’t teach him.

(He is, on all fronts, barred from ever enlisting.)

Christina is the dream girl Amestris wants, the girl everyone wants to have as a daughter and the girl every little girl wants to be. Things begin to be tense when she was seven and she was always so sad when her mother couldn’t braid her hair, or couldn’t make pretty dresses, and didn’t like fireworks and never smiled enough. 

(Riza blamed her mother for that, for leaving her without ever telling her how to raise a girl. Then she realised that’s the only thing daughters do.)

Hugo is raised as well-adjusted as they could be. He grows up in the public eye, with very few moments to be alone, find himself outside of being a politician's son. Samson has alchemy and Christina has society, and Hugo has only the world he was curated in.

(But he’s kind, like his namesake, and that’s the only thing that matters.)

  
  
  


“When did children,” Roy starts, and it could be any time in their marriage, or anytime in their children’s lives. “Get so hard to manage?”

Always, Riza thinks. And it’s not that children themselves are hard to manage, it’s all the love you have for them and sometimes, with all the blood on her hands, she feels unholy to love them, care for them.

Because ultimately, they have children they don’t deserve and they are parents their children deserve better from.

(They have a family.)

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading !


End file.
